Irish medical student culture and the performance of masculinity, c.1880–1930

Abstract

Irish medical student culture and the performance of masculinity, c.1880-1930 Medical education, for the male students who undertook it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marked an important transition from boyhood to manhood, regardless of location. Varying aspects of medical studies were described as 'rites of passage' or hardships, competitive feats that students had to get through to in order to complete their metamorphosis from medical student to fully-fledged member of the profession. These rites of passage were couched in increasingly masculine terms and students' spaces became centres for the performance of masculinity. However, such rites of passage and the ways they were configured as masculine activities, have received limited attention from historians. 1 In his ambitious comparative study of medical education in Britain, France, the United States and Germany, Thomas Neville Bonner asserted that 'the lives and experiences of students in general and their impact on medical education have been too little studied'. 2 Similarly, Keir Waddington has pointed out that studies of medical students have tended to focus on the structure of medical training as part of the history of professionalization and more recently attention has been directed at the move away from book learning and apprenticeship to the institutionalization of teaching in the eighteenth century and the impact of Paris medicine'. 3 Recent research has honed in on the social backgrounds and day-today experiences of medical students. 4 Crowther and Dupree, for example, in their comprehensive study of the social backgrounds and careers of medical students at Glasgow and Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, have illuminated aspects of medical student life such as living conditions and extra-curricular activities. Furthermore, they have shown how friendships formed in medical school could prove useful assets in graduates' careers. 5 Other recent studies of the history of medical education have tended to focus on the educational experiences of medical students, while some have highlighted how the image of the medical student was improved in the nineteenth century and the importance of shared educational activities in helping to create cohesive bonds between future medical practitioners. 6 However, although historians of education have illuminated how manliness became a crucial force in student life in the nineteenth and twentieth century, particularly in the context of British universities, less attention has been paid to how masculine ideals were passed on to medical students and how educational and extra-curricular spheres became centres of gendered performances and sites for the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. 7

Review of periodical literature on the history of education published in 2016

“…17 Many of these concern intellectual history and the history of universities and libraries, with a particular interest in the history of science, which is certainly growing among scholars of this period. Overlaps with the history of medicine, which are increasingly apparent in studies of later periods, 18 can also be seen in Murphy's article, which appears in Past and Present. 19 20 The links between literacy and politics are explored in Roberts's article on the diary of the Worcestershire royalist Henry Townshend during the English civil war.…”